In which I argue that a unifying mission to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction.
Harvard’s state-of-the-art Northwest Science Building is found at 52 Oxford Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a ten-minute walk from the tourists packing the university’s famed central yard. It’s part of a complex of hulking brick-and-glass laboratories that form the new heart of Harvard’s fabled research engine. Inside, the Northwest looks like a Hollywood vision of a science lab. The hallways defining the perimeter of each floor are polished concrete and lit dimly in the style of television crime procedurals.
Inside the hallways, in the center of the building, are the wetlabs, with graduate students manipulating pipettes visible through windowed steel doors. On the other side of the hallway are the professors’ offices, defined by floor-to-ceiling glass partitions. It was one of these offices in particular that drew me to the Northwest on a sunny June afternoon—the office of Pardis Sabeti, a thirty-five-year-old professor of evolutionary biology who had mastered one of the more elusive but powerful strategies in the quest for work you love.
One of the first things you’ll notice if you spend time around Pardis is that she enjoys her life. Biology, like any high-stakes academic field, is demanding. Because of this it has a reputation for turning young professors into curmudgeons who adopt a masochistic brand of workaholism, in which relaxation becomes a sign of failure and the accomplishments of peers become tragedies. This can be a bleak existence. Pardis, for her part, has avoided this fate.
Not five minutes into my visit, for example, a young grad student, one of ten people Pardis employs in her eponymous Sabeti Lab, pokes his head into the office.
“We’re heading down to volleyball practice,” he says, referencing the lab’s team, which evidently takes itself seriously. She promises to join them as soon as our interview ends.
Volleyball is not Pardis’s only hobby. In a corner of her office she keeps an acoustic guitar that serves as more than decoration: Pardis plays in a band called Thousand Days, which is well known in Boston music circles. In 2008, PBS featured the band in a Nova special called Researchers Who Rock.
Pardis’s energy for these activities is a side effect of her enthusiasm for her work. The bulk of her research focuses on Africa, with studies ongoing in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and most of all, Nigeria. To Pardis, this work is about more than just the accumulation of publications and grant money. At one point in our conversation, for example, she pulls out her laptop: “You have to see this video of me and my girls,” she says, loading up a YouTube clip of Pardis, guitar in hand, leading a group of four African women in a song. The video was shot outdoors in Nigeria. Palm trees provide the backdrop. The women, I learn, work in a clinic supported by the Sabeti Lab. “These women deal with people who die in devastating ways every day,” she says to no one in particular while the video plays. On screen, everyone is smiling while Pardis leads them, with mixed success, through the verses. “I love going there,” she adds. “Nigeria is my African home.”
It’s clear that Pardis has avoided the grinding cynicism that traps so many young academics, and has instead built an engaging life (“It’s not always easy,” she once said in an interview, “but I truly love what I do”1). But how did she pull off this feat? As I spent time with Pardis, I recognized that her happiness comes from the fact that she built her career on a clear and compelling mission—something that not only gives meaning to her work but provides the energy needed to embrace life beyond the lab. In the overachieving style typical of Harvard, Pardis’s mission is by no means subtle: Her goal, put simply, is to rid the world of its most ancient and deadly diseases.
As a graduate student, Pardis stumbled into the emerging field of computational genetics—the use of computers to help understand DNA sequences. She developed an algorithm that sifts through databases of human genetic information looking for traces of an elusive target: ongoing human evolution. To the general public, the idea that humans are still evolving can be surprising, but among evolutionary biologists it’s taken for granted. (One of the classic examples of recent human evolution is lactose tolerance—the ability to digest milk into adulthood—a trait that didn’t start spreading through the human population until we domesticated milk-producing animals.)
Pardis’s algorithm uses statistical techniques to hunt down patterns of gene migration that match what you would expect from selective pressure—for example, a mutation that popped up recently in human development but has since spread quickly among a population. The algorithm, in other words, searches blindly, turning up “candidate” genes that look like they’re the result of natural selection, but leaving it up to the researcher to figure out why natural selection deemed the gene useful.
Pardis uses the algorithm to search for recently evolved genes that provide disease resistance. Her logic is that if she can find these genes and understand how they work, biomedical researchers might be able to mimic their benefit in a treatment. It makes sense, of course, that disease-resistance genes would be among the candidates turned up by Pardis’s algorithm, as they provide a classic example of natural selection in action. If a deadly virus has been killing off humans in a population for a long time, biologists would say that this population is under “selective pressure.” If a lucky few members of the group then happen to evolve a resistance to the disease, this pressure ensures that the new gene will spread quickly (people with the new gene die less frequently than those without it). This rapid spread of a new gene is exactly the type of signature Pardis’s algorithm has been tuned to detect.
Pardis’s first big discovery was a gene that provides resistance to Lhassa fever, one of the oldest and most deadly diseases of the African continent, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year. (“People don’t just die with this disease,” she emphasized, “they die extreme deaths.”) She has since added malaria and the bubonic plague to the list of “ancient scourges” that she’s tackling with her computational strategy.
Pardis’s career is driven by a clear mission: to use new technology to fight old diseases. This research is clearly important—an observation emphasized by the fact that she’s received seven-figure grants for her work from both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the NIH. Later in this book, we’ll dive into the details of how she found this focus, but what’s important to note now is that her mission provides her a sense of purpose and energy, traits that have helped her avoid becoming a cynical academic and instead embrace her work with enthusiasm. Her mission is the foundation on which she builds love for what she does, and therefore it’s a career strategy we need to better understand.
To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work. Staying up late to save your corporate litigation client a few extra million dollars can be draining, but staying up late to help cure an ancient disease can leave you more energized than when you started—perhaps even providing the extra enthusiasm needed to start a lab volleyball team or tour with a rock band.
I was drawn to Pardis Sabeti because her career is driven by a mission and she’s reaped happiness in return. After meeting her, I went searching for other people who leveraged this trait to create work they love. This search led me to a young archaeologist whose mission to popularize his field led to his own television series on the Discovery Channel, and to a bored programmer who systematically studied marketing to devise a mission that injected excitement back into his working life. In all three cases, I tried to decode exactly how these individuals found and then successfully deployed their missions. In short, I wanted an answer to an important question: How do you make mission a reality in your working life?
The answers I found are complicated. To better understand this complexity, let’s put the topic back into the broader context of the book. In the preceding rules, I have argued that “follow your passion” is bad advice, as most people aren’t born with pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered. If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up “career capital” by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work. As I’ll explain, mission is one of these desirable traits, and like any such desirable trait, it too requires that you first build career capital—a mission launched without this expertise is likely doomed to sputter and die.
But capital alone is not enough to make a mission a reality. Plenty of people are good at what they do but haven’t reoriented their career in a compelling direction. Accordingly, I will go on to explore a pair of advanced tactics that also play an important role in making the leap from a good idea for a mission to actually making that mission a reality. In the chapters ahead, you’ll learn the value of systematically experimenting with different proto-missions to seek out a direction worth pursuing. You’ll also learn the necessity of deploying a marketing mindset in the search for your focus. In other words, missions are a powerful trait to introduce into your working life, but they’re also fickle, requiring careful coaxing to make them a reality.
This subtlety probably explains why so many people lack an organizing focus to their careers, even though such focus is widely admired: Missions are hard. By this point in my quest, however, I had become comfortable with “hard,” and I hope that if you’ve made it this far in the book, you have gained this comfort as well. Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.